Forgive me if this topic has been breached before, but there's been a hell of a lot of speculation on the alternative type websites about electronically counted voting trends not matching the exit polls, when in the past the exit polls were a pretty reliable indication.

Anyways, I felt it my duty to bring it up, especially after finding this gem on CNN.com

quote:Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Glitch. Glitch in the voting system, or glitch in the corruption system?

His blog has become nearly ground zero for this stuff on the internet, which is rather spectacular as it's corporate (MSNBC operated). If you're at all interested in the subject, that link above should be your first stop.

Some of this stuff can be checked. Some of it, sadly, can't (thanks to retarded paperless electronic voting).

If at any stage a president is found to have been elected through fraud or error, what ought to happen? I'd say that they should be replaced because the electoral system is more important than continuity. But, anyhow. Can't see this lot amounting to anything.

Well, my own personal stance is it probably won't make a difference in terms of who is president, but that isn't to say it's not dreadfully important and demanding of attention. If the vote had been say 50,000 closer in Ohio, we would all be in the midst of total electoral breakdown at this point, based on this stuff. I don't think it should be about "This went wrong so Kerry is president, or this didn't so Bush is" sort of thing. It should be "Man, this system here fucking blows. Somebody should fix that."

Yeah, both sides were worried about electoral fraud before the election, but I guess that what they really meant was 'we're scared it might cost us victory'. Both sides should be bothered about it now even when it won't sway the election.

My position would be that you can't necessarily prove the negative (given paperless voting in places), but you can't make the positive accusation without a lot of evidence (because it is so serious) so in the meantime we assume that it was a fair election, at least in the result (there might have been fraud that didn't change the result and that, as paint points out, is really important in itself because it might be replicated at a time when the election does depend on it). So scoffing at the idea that it was cheated, or that it was fair, can't be justified. What can be justified, I think, is the position that we assume that the election was fair.

Incidentally, if the exit polls had been really off, that would raise concerns about the election, once you'd first checked on the polling methodology.

As mentioned here:http://www.asylumnation.com/asylum/...096/index.html?
Venezeula invented an affordable voting rig that had paper auditing, solid state memory, and secure encryption.http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1197
And its less expensive than the US company's solution.
There is no excuse for having no physical means of auditing. There is no excuse for retaining the services of a vendor who's company president has plegded to deliver electorial votes.
Even if the election was 100% valid and no wrong doing was done: allowing the perception of tampering by makeing the process so obviously suspicious is not excusable. Especially when the recent electorial history of the country has undeniable incidents of mass electorial tampering.
(Vote purge in Florida 2000 and 2004)
How an the democracy have integrety when the electorial process lacks it?

quote:
A lot of theories and suspect evidence have been floating around here lately. Emotions are high as tinfoil and supposed reality collide. And in all of the banter I'm afraid that a real, provable election fraud is being overlooked.

While the exit polls are anomalous and some of the so-called evidence has been debunked, proponents of both sides should be able to agree on one thing: there should not even be a question as to who won.

Indeed, the fraud in this election that is incontravertable so far is that private corporations, using copyrighted, proprietary code, counted the public's votes in secret.

Now, we may very well uncover proof of tampering. But I seriously doubt it. The main feature of operating systems that use a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is that you only see the interface. The code and processes run undetectibly in the background. And this is the problem. A poll watcher can sit attentively at the vote counting machine and not see one vote counted. I actually saw a CVM advocate on NBC recently explain how you can in fact do a recount. "You just hit the 'Enter' key again and voila, a recount." It would have been funny...

Unverifiable ballots and ballot tabulation is a violation of the most basic principle of democracy. Proprietary software secretly tabulating our votes is the absolute equivalent to letting some guy named Ed go off into a closed room by himself and count our votes in private. That we're even having to have this conversion is incomprehensible to me.

This is why I, and many others, were so adamant that these things need paper reciepts at least, and should be scrapped at best.

I'm not an election lawyer, but I do know that many states --if not all-- call for a public monitored counting of the votes. And this is why counting votes behind the closed door of a Graphical User Interface is as much a fraud as stealing a box of ballots.

So before you guys and gals get too mad at each other over whether this or that is provable, please keep in mind that the very fact that we're even having to argue about it is the evidence of the real fraud in this election: that we just don't know.

I happen to agree that paper receipts are a necessity. I believe in free and true elections with monitors and some kind of controls in place to ensure that every vote in counted and no hacking has taken place. These paperless machines are idiotic and I'm ashamed of those who put them in place.